treasury department

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner got an earful last week from House Democrats wary of the White House proposal to pay for government rescues of Wall Street firms by taxing healthy competitors only after Washington steps in. The critics want companies to pre-pay instead into a kind of sitting insurance fund to be used for the [...]

It’s no mystery that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is the ultimate Wall Street insider. But it seems that more and more Democrats are losing their patience with what they perceive as his protectionism of the finance industry at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. The latest to weigh in is Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who [...]

Testifying before House lawmakers yesterday, Sheila Bair, head of  the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, endorsed much of the controversial proposal to grant the White House new powers to take over Wall Street investment firms when their failure threatens the larger financial system.
A timely, orderly resolution process that could be applied to both banks and non-bank [...]

As Mike pointed out today, the slow pace of loan modification progress has prompted some lawmakers to once again call for mortgage cramdown legislation that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify loans and keep borrowers in their homes.
But the Obama administration is signaling clearly that while it may be open to some new tactics, cramdown [...]

Here’s the money quote from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, interviewed Monday by CNN about the role of government in regulating Wall Street:
The financial markets are too important to the economy to be left to the markets alone. You need a strong framework of regulations, a much stronger framework than we had.

A federal court on Tuesday ruled for the first time ever that the government cannot freeze an organization’s assets for suspected ties to terror financing without first obtaining a warrant.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio had filed the lawsuit in November 2008 on behalf of an Ohio-based charity called KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development, [...]

It’s hard to imagine now, but it wasn’t all that long ago when it could be hard to find average folks who knew or cared that much about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the oddly-named, government-sponsored entitites that own or guarantee about half the nation’s mortgages. The obscure workings of the secondary market weren’t exactly [...]

As a quick addition to Mary’s thoughts on yesterday’s Treasury Department report confirming the reluctance of mortgage servicers to modify loans through the administration’s Making Home Affordable program, it’s worth noting that some of the poorest-performing banks are the same institutions that appeared before Congress just a few weeks ago with declarations that they were [...]

The Treasury Department’s report on the progress — or lack of it — among servicers doing loan modifications makes it seem like the Obama administration is keeping a close eye on its Making Home Affordable Program. But Felix Salmon at Reuters takes a second look at Treasury report, and raises some important questions. Salmon notes [...]

Because servicers in the lending industry can make more money collecting delinquency fees on mortgages than by modifying loans, guess which road they are taking? The New York Times says today that the longer borrowers remain behind on their payments, the more money servicers collect, even after the home goes into foreclosure. That obviously gives [...]